Microsoft and Salesforce Strike New Partnership

Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc., late Thursday announced a partnership integrating some of their enterprise products and, presumably, easing the burden of those businesses that are customers to both vendors. The agreement will let Windows and Windows Phone 8.1 customers access Salesforce from their Windows devices. The two companies will create new interoperability between Salesforce and Microsoft’s Office 365.

The partnership could be welcome news to enterprise customers who are increasingly growing tired of the difficulties integrating clouds from different vendors. One CIO told CIO Journal in recent weeks that he’d opted to write his own software rather than hassle with trying to connect different clouds.

“This partnership is about helping customers extract more value from our technology,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. When asked about Microsoft’s customer relationship management tool Dynamics, which competes with Salesforce, Mr. Nadella acknowledged that there will be some areas where the two companies will compete.

“We are integrating the Salesforce apps with Office and Windows at a deeper level than was previously available,” said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff.

The deal marks a thawing of the relationship between the two companies. In 2010, Mr. Benioff tweeted, “Microsoft can run anti-salesforce WSJ adds, protest our cust events, and even sue us. But they can not stop the cloud. The force is with us!”

The relationship between the two companies began to take a turn for the better once Salesforce.com acquired the digital marketing platform ExactTarget. At that point, Microsoft became a customer of the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. Mr. Benioff noted on the conference call that ExactTarget is embedded within Office 365.

Mr. Nadella, who prior to becoming CEO ran Microsoft’s enterprise division, is a proponent of the cloud, credited with helping build out Microsoft’s cloud services. Perhaps the most telling detail about the state of their relationship, though, is that Marc Benioff – who famously runs his company from his smartphone – said he’d now start doing so with a Windows mobile device.

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